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Ten Degrees and Getting Colder

  Cold Sunrise   That's just the name of the song written by Gordon Lightfoot.  It was actually -13 F when I got up this morning (wind chill -24).  Tucson may have pulled back into the lead!  There's a lot of weighing pros and cons of Colorado vs Arizona by the wood stove.  Not much else to report. I did enjoy a few games of pool and a beer with my brother this week.  We don't get together very often, so it's good to try to keep the lines of communication open, especially with my mother celebrating her 86th birthday next month.  He lives in Milwaukee and just started semi-retirement.  Our opposing politics and lifestyles keep things very casual and surface-level.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.   It's important to find common ground.  He and his wife have started going to concerts and recently saw the Steve Miller Band.  Music is one of our common interests.      

Lake Life

Mike and I have known each other since we were 18-year-old freshmen at UW-Madison.  At Spring Break, we drove my old VW Bug to Daytona with the plan to trade transportation for space on someone's hotel room carpet.  It worked for the most part, except for a night or two on the beach, which I learned wasn't as comfortable as I imagined.  

Mike's favorite story from that trip is when the car keys fell out of my pocket during one of those overnights on the sand.  We didn't really have a Plan B so we started kicking up sand from around where I slept.  Somehow, I managed to kick up the car keys to our mutual surprise.  Luck sometimes comes to the young and foolish.

I lost touch with many of my college friends over the years.  Mike and I reconnected through a Lodi friend who was someone that Mike worked and socialized with.  Mike and his wife Kathy lived in Madison, but sold that house and built a retirement log cabin on a northern Wisconsin lake where the winter is long, and summer is brief.


 

We had a great time, hanging out and telling stories of the old days.  Mike took us out on his pontoon boat where we slowly cruised for several hours.

Mike, me, and Brad

 

Fran, Kathy, and Julia
 

That night, Mike grilled up a big slab of flank steak and later made (from scratch) strawberry shortcake with whipped cream.

 

With Brad, Fran, Mike, Kathy, and Mike's son Robb staying in the cabin, we elected to bring the Scamp along.  We found an RV park about a mile from Mike's place.   We had some concerns about what it might be like.  There were no pictures or reviews on the internet, and the campground manager said that she had plenty of space on what would normally be a busy summer weekend with great weather. 

When we pulled up, we saw a trailer park on one side and tiny crowded cabins on the other side.  Our hearts sank, "Oh, no."  But a hand-painted sign directed us to the campground at the rear of the property on a deeply rutted gravel driveway.  Much to our surprise, it was kinda nice.  It took awhile to get level, but there was lots of space, and only a few seasonal campers, the nearest of which was more than a baseball throw away.  And it was quiet.



From the Scamp's back window


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